Posts from — April 2011

1. How often do you back up the files?The answer you should be looking for is that they backup every night. You should also keep a up to date copy of your site on your computer to be on the safe side.

2. What sort of equipment and software are in place to ensure that my site is up?

Most Internet Hosting Companies use some combination of equipment and software to ensure that the servers are up and working. You want to make sure that the server is hooked up to an UPS (uninterrupted Power Supply). The UPS is just a big battery that will provide the server with power for 30 minutes to several hours. Also most Hosting Companies have software and equipment that monitors the servers and restarts them if they quit serving pages. You will also want to know if this fails, does the company have a way to restart the server manually.

3. How many domains can I host per account?

If you have 2 domain names, say joestools.com and cooltools.com, and wanted them to both go to the same site, would they charge you extra for the domain names or since it all goes to one site will you be charged just for one. If you plan on hosing several sites to see which ones will be successful, you might want to ask for a volume discount or ask if they have a reseller package.

4. What are their billing policies?

You need to find out who to contact if you have a problem with billing and what is the process for resolving problems.

5. What is the procedure for uploading files to your account?

You want to know if you will have 24 hour FTP access. Some hosting companies restrict how you can upload files to the servers.

6. Do they provide log files or Stats?

Hosting companies usually do one or the other, either provide you with the raw logs for you account or provide you with some sort of online statistics. You will want to make sure that the logs contain information from search engines on the words and phrases used, how long the visitor stayed at the site, entry page, number of page visits, broken links and errors, and exit page.

7. Do they provide Form to email processing?

Nearly every hosting company will provide atleast a basic form of this. You will want to know if there are any limitations on the size of the form. Also you might want to ask if there is a way to encrypt the form. If so you could use this for an ecommerce solution until you are ready for a shopping cart.

8. What exactly is included in the monthly charge?

You want to know what the features of the account are, but you also want to know if you need them to do something extra whether there will be a charge for it.

9. How quickly they respond when you have questions?

Before choosing a hosting company call them up or email them with a question and see how quickly they have an answer for you.

HostSG is an award winning web hosting company with years of experience with the best infrastructure to host your application and mission-critical data in Singapore to Asia.

Unless overtly listed otherwise, most web hosting packages you^‘ll come across in your search are what are called shared hosting providers. What this means is that the server or servers that host your website are simultaneously hosting numerous other websites also. This gives you a discounted rate on web hosting services in exchange for tolerating certain technical constraints, like bandwidth, disk space, upload and download speeds, security and privacy, traffic, and probably the most notable restriction — total control.If you want total control not only over the administration of your website but also over the very hardware and software used to run it, then you should be evaluating not shared hosting providers, but dedicated hosting providers. If your business is large enough or growing fast enough that it requires its own internet connection and server, you may need a dedicated web host.

What^‘s the downside to going with dedicated hosting providers? In a word: responsibility. In most areas of life, with total control comes total responsibility, and it^‘s no different with hosting providers. With a dedicated server, the onus is on you to buy, install, and maintain the actual equipment — the server itself — mounted in the dedicated hosting providers^‘ data center.

Fortunately, you still get the benefit of their presumably top-notch, around-the-clock security over the physical premises, but you remain fully responsible for the security of your cyber-premises. Likewise, dedicated hosting providers will ensure that the systems in the building are all provided with redundant uninterruptible and backup power and environmental controls, but it^‘s you who must keep your machines and cables maintained and functioning in this idyll environment.

How do you identify whether it^‘s time to switch from a shared host to a dedicated host? There are 3 main indicators to stay alert for:

Speed

If the traffic streaming through your shared server is slowing down your customers^‘ pace as they browse your site (or your employees, if an in-house site), it may simply be time to look for more unencumbered shared hosting. But if you^‘ve tried several shared hosting providers with the same results, then it may be time to remind yourself how impatient the average web surfer is. While you^‘re jumping from shared host to shared host trying to save a buck, your customers are jumping ship. Your ability to respond promptly and effectively to customer transactions and inquiries cannot be overemphasized either.

Reliability

The limits to your control are nowhere more apparent than in the areas of reliability and security. It’s not simply that problems can arise: problems do arise. It^‘s the nature of the biz. And if you don^‘t have unlimited access to your own operating system, software and database apps, etc., there^‘s not much you can do when one arises.

Customizability

If your company is growing fast, you^‘re going to be changing many aspects of your web presence along with it. You may regularly need to tweak your disk space and bandwidth and experiment with using different applications to better serve your changing needs. On a shared host, upgrading in such a way usually involves leaping from one “package” or “plan” to another. These packages are generally preset and may or may not serve your immediate needs. They may be riddled with programs you don^‘t yet need, for example, yet lack in the one singular program you do. Or the next leap up from your current plan has way more disk space and bandwidth than you need at the moment. With a dedicated server, you can make changes incrementally, step forward, step back, heck, step sideways if you need to — and when you need to.

In large part, it^‘s the size and growth rate of your business that will dictate whether you need a shared or dedicated host. Affordability and personal time commitment are nice secondary considerations, but if your business is booming, you would do it a great injustice to try and save on a few bucks and few extra hours per week of your time in exchange for slower and poorer quality of service for your customers.

By the same token, however, if your business is small enough to function quite smoothly on any of the shared hosting providers out there, don^‘t squander your precious capital on a dedicated server just so you can have total control. Because sometimes total control isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Domain Names and Anchor Text

Branding vs Naming

Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.
The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their domain name for more than just branding.
Superstar Websites
People take the branding idea one step further and rattle off some of the best technological leaders. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, etc. None of these sites say what they do in their site name.
Google is so powerful because it is the only Google. It was a wide open market. Yahoo! became Yahoo! because there was no great well marketed directory on the web. Ebay became Ebay because nobody else had a PEZ trading marketplace and it’s creators wife needed a place to trade her PEZ. (Ebay is yet one more great thing we all owe to PEZ).
Business Facts
Most successful businesses or websites will not be like Google. Most will not be a runaway technological success. Most businesses become successful from soft innovations. Small focused consumer centric changes can help you craft a successful business model.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is extremely important to search engines. What a link says is as important as who is saying it. When I link to your site with the words “I eat cats” as the link text a search engine will evaluate that link and assume you eat cats.

You can’t control all the links you get (meow), but you can help control some of them. People often link to you using the words in your domain name as the link text (also known as anchor text.) If your domain name has your primary keywords in it then you have an extremely powerful business advantage over your competitors.

Using Dashes in Domain Names

Most of the benefit of dashes in the domain name have eroded in the last year or two. Domain names themselves have been greatly devalued in search engine algorithms, and most links use the site name vice the domain name as the anchor text.

I am of the opinion that you usually can pick out a keyword rich domain name without needing dashes. It may take a bit of creativity and a bit of time, but it is possible. If you are aiming to sell products vice become a consultant you may be able to do well making a living from search engine traffic and not need as strong of a branded name behind your domain.

Brandable Generic Domain Names

High quality directories usually prefer to list sites by their name vice “insert keyword phrase here.”
Having a domain name like mine makes it very easy for me to get inbound links with “SEO Book” or “Search Engine Optimization Book” as the link text. This allows me to rank better for those search phrases, and eventually it will allow me to rank good for “SEO” and “search engine optimization.”

Otherwise known as cloud computing, cloud hosting is a process that involves the combination of a number of servers for the sole purpose of providing a more stable hosting solution. This is a more commonly used hosting system as it maximizes the use of the available resources as opposed to other systems. The idea of combining several servers together was preferred as it improves the overall performance of all servers and the output is much better. Generally, the process involves an advanced form of web hosting that is designed to massively increase its hosting power whenever you have a huge traffic on your website. By so doing, the visitors do not have a difficult time navigating through the site and they end up getting to fulfill their mission of visiting the site. The server design is quite resourceful as it lowers the hosting power when there isn’t much traffic so as to avoid wastage .

Cloud computing is entirely useful as in as much as it is effective in its operations, it is also cheap to have. The system works like the prepaid electricity billing method where you only pay for what you use. You will get to save on human resources costs as you don’t need to hire someone to take care of the servers for you. Another thing to say goodbye to are installation and maintenance costs as there is no such thing in cloud computing. There is no doubt that cloud computing has indeed gone mainstream . In as much as not every of its aspects is entirely perfect, there are quite a number of services that it is able to deliver successfully . That is why there is growing popularity on the use of the cloud hosting service .

The load of the servers is entirely taken care of by the combination of several servers. The system ensures that the work at hand is shared and none of the machines on the shared platform is left idle or overworked. This is a great idea to avoid a failure of the system, should any of the servers fail. By switching your systems to use the cloud computing technology, crashing servers will be a thing of the past . Under cloud computing, the server to be used is never set up at the customer’s location. The servers are randomly distributed so that there is absolutely no chance of them experiencing any faults and should that arise, the system will work just fine without shutting down.
HostSG offers shared Cloud hosting service popularly known as Cloud Sites. With full redundancy and high uptime guarantee, it provide next generation hosting for web site with high requirement. Cloud Sites only starts from S$8.50 monthly.